3. After 3 years of failed attempts, Leonardo Sens finally managed to capture this fantastic shot of the Christ the Redeemer statue in Brazil seemingly holding the moon. pic.twitter.com/9qQ1lXh0sz
As an adaptive trait, curiosity draws us to seek information and new experiences. It’s how we learn about ourselves, others, and the world.
…
They’re a diverse group of people, but the literature suggests that they share some common habits that support their personal and professional growth.
The artificial intelligence sector has never been more competitive. Forbes received some 1,900 submissions this year, more than double last year’s count. Applicants do not pay a fee to be considered and are judged for their business promise and technical usage of AI through a quantitative algorithm and qualitative judging panels. Companies are encouraged to share data on diversity, and our list aims to promote a more equitable startup ecosystem. But disparities remain sharp in the industry. Only 12 companies have women cofounders, five of whom serve as CEO, the same count as last year. For more, see our full package of coverage, including a detailed explanation of the list methodology, videos and analyses on trends in AI.
New Generative AI video tools coming to Premiere Pro this year will streamline workflows and unlock new creative possibilities, from extending a shot to adding or removing objects in a scene
Adobe is developing a video model for Firefly, which will power video and audio editing workflows in Premiere Pro and enable anyone to create and ideate
Adobe previews early explorations of bringing third-party generative AI models from OpenAI, Pika Labs and Runway directly into Premiere Pro, making it easy for customers to draw on the strengths of different models within the powerful workflows they use every day
AI-powered audio workflows in Premiere Pro are now generally available, making audio editing faster, easier and more intuitive
We keep breaking new ground in AI capabilities, and there seems little interest in asking if we should build the next model to be more life-like. You can now go to Hume.AI and have a conversation with an Empathetic Voice Interface. EVI is groundbreaking and extremely unnerving, but it is no more capable of genuine empathy than your toaster oven.
…
You can have the eLLM mimic a political campaign and call potential voters to sway their vote. You can do this ethically or program it to prey upon people with misinformation.
An eLLM can be used to socially engineer the public based on the values someone programs into it. Whose values, though?
Any company with a digital presence can use an eLLM like EVI to influence their customers. Imagine Alexa suddenly being able to empathize with you as a means to help persuade you to order more products.
An always-on, empathetic system can help a student stay on track to graduate or manipulate them into behaviors that erode their autonomy and free will.
Any foreign government could deploy such a system against a neighboring population and use empathy as a weapon to sow discontent within the opposing population.
From DSC: Marc offers some solid thoughts that should make us all pause and reflect on what he’s saying.
We can endlessly rationalize away the reasons why machines possessing such traits can be helpful, but where is the line that developers and users of such systems refuse to cross in this race to make machines more like us?
Marc Watkins
Along these lines, also see:
Student Chatbot Use ‘Could Be Increasing Loneliness’ — from insidehighered.com by Tom Williams Study finds students who rely on ChatGPT for academic tasks feel socially supported by artificial intelligence at the expense of their real-life relationships.
…
They found “evidence that while AI chatbots designed for information provision may be associated with student performance, when social support, psychological well-being, loneliness and sense of belonging are considered it has a net negative effect on achievement,” according to the paper published in Studies in Higher Education.
Do you use chatbots as a thought partner and collaborator? This year, I’ve spent time with educators all across the country to lead workshops on using Generative AI for instructional planning. If you want to use AI to support student creativity in your classroom, I have a handful of prompts that are ready for you to try.
…
Today on the blog, we’ll look at prompts to help support student creativity. You can tailor to your instructional environment.
How Early Adopters of Gen AI Are Gaining Efficiencies — from knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu by Prasanna (Sonny) Tambe and Scott A. Snyder; via Ray Schroeder on LinkedIn Enterprises are seeing gains from generative AI in productivity and strategic planning, according to speakers at a recent Wharton conference.
Its unique strengths in translation, summation, and content generation are especially useful in processing unstructured data. Some 80% of all new data in enterprises is unstructured, he noted, citing research firm Gartner. Very little of that unstructured data that resides in places like emails “is used effectively at the point of decision making,” he noted. “[With gen AI], we have a real opportunity” to garner new insights from all the information that resides in emails, team communication platforms like Slack, and agile project management tools like Jira, he said.
Here are 6 YouTube channels I watch to stay up to date with AI. This list will be useful whether you’re a casual AI enthusiast or an experienced programmer.
1. Matt Wolfe: AI for non-coders
This is a fast-growing YouTube channel focused on artificial intelligence for non-coders. On this channel, you’ll find videos about ChatGPT, Midjourney, and any AI tool that it’s gaining popularity.
#3 Photomath
Photomath is a comprehensive math help app that provides step-by-step explanations for a wide range of math problems, from elementary to college level. Photomath is only available as a mobile app. (link)
Features:
Get step-by-step solutions with multiple methods to choose from
Scan any math problem, including word problems, using the app’s camera
Access custom visual aids and extra “how” and “why” tips for deeper understanding
Google researchers have developed a new artificial intelligence system that can generate lifelike videos of people speaking, gesturing and moving — from just a single still photo. The technology, called VLOGGER, relies on advanced machine learning models to synthesize startlingly realistic footage, opening up a range of potential applications while also raising concerns around deepfakes and misinformation.
I’m fascinated by the potential of these tools to augment and enhance our work and creativity. There’s no denying the impressive capabilities we’re already seeing with text generation, image creation, coding assistance, and more. Used thoughtfully, AI can be a powerful productivity multiplier.
At the same time, I have significant concerns about the broader implications of this accelerating technology, especially for education and society at large. We’re traversing new ground at a breakneck pace, and it’s crucial that we don’t blindly embrace AI without considering the potential risks.
My worry is that by automating away too many tasks, even seemingly rote ones like creating slide decks, we risk losing something vital—humanity at the heart of knowledge work.
Nvidia has announced a partnership with Hippocratic AI to introduce AI “agents” aimed at replacing nurses in hospitals. These AI “nurses” come at a significantly low cost compared to human nurses and are purportedly intended to address staffing issues by handling “low-risk,” patient-facing tasks via video calls. However, concerns are raised regarding the ethical implications and effectiveness of replacing human nurses with AI, particularly given the complex nature of medical care.
A glimpse of the future of AI at work:
I got early access to Devin, the “AI developer” – it is slow & breaks often, but you can start to see what an AI agent can do.
It makes a plan and executes it autonomously, doing research, writing code & debugging, without you watching. pic.twitter.com/HHBQQDQZ9q
NVIDIA Digital Human Technologies Bring AI Characters to Life
Leading AI Developers Use Suite of NVIDIA Technologies to Create Lifelike Avatars and Dynamic Characters for Everything From Games to Healthcare, Financial Services and Retail Applications
Today is the beginning of our moonshot to solve embodied AGI in the physical world. I’m so excited to announce Project GR00T, our new initiative to create a general-purpose foundation model for humanoid robot learning.
Below are some items for those creatives who might be interested in telling stories, designing games, crafting audio-based experiences, composing music, developing new worlds using 3D graphics, and more.
The sounds of any game can make or break the experience for its players. Many of our favorite adventures come roaring back into our minds when we hear a familiar melody, or maybe it’s a special sound effect that reminds us of our time performing a particularly heroic feat… or the time we just caused some havoc with friends. With Lightfall sending Guardians to explore the new destination of Neomuna, there’s an entire universe hidden away within the sounds—both orchestral and diegetic—for Guardians to uncover and immerse themselves in. We recently assembled some of Destiny’s finest sound designers and composers to dive a little bit deeper into the stunning depths of Neomuna’s auditory experience.
Before diving into the interview with our incredible team, we wanted to make sure you have seen the Lightfall music documentary that went out shortly after the expansion’s release. This short video is a great introduction to how our team worked to create the music of Lightfall and is a must-see for audiophiles and Destiny fans alike.
Every game has a story to tell, a journey to take players through that — if done well — can inspire wonderful memories that last a lifetime. Unlike other storytelling mediums, the art of video games is an intricate interweaving of experiences, including psychological cues that are designed to entrance players and make them feel like they’re a part of the story. One way this is achieved is through the art of audio. And no, we aren’t just talking about the many incredible soundtracks out there, we’re talking about the oftentimes overlooked universe of audio design.
… What does an audio designer do?
“Number one? We don’t work on music. That’s a thing almost everyone thinks every audio designer does,” jokes Nyte when opening up about beginning her quest into the audio world. “That, or for a game like Destiny, people just assume we only work on weapon sounds and nothing else. Which, [Juan] Uribe does, but a lot of us don’t. There is this entire gamut of other sounds that are in-game that people don’t really notice. Some do, and that’s always cool, but audio is about all sounds coming together for a ‘whole’ audio experience.”
On the Transformation of Entertainment
What company will be the Pixar of the AI era? What talent agency will be the CAA of the AI era? How fast can the entertainment industry evolve to natively leverage AI, and what parts will be disrupted by the industry’s own ambivalence? Or are all of these questions myopic…and should we anticipate a wave of entirely new categories of entertainment?
We are starting to see material adoption of AI tools across many industries, including media and entertainment. No doubt, these tools will transform the processes behind generating content. But what entirely new genres of content might emerge? The platform shift to AI-based workflows might give rise to entirely new types of companies that transform entertainment as we know it – from actor representation, Hollywood economics, consumption devices and experiences, to the actual mediums of entertainment themselves. Let’s explore just a few of the more edgy implications:
The early vibrations of AI have already been shaking the newsroom. One downside of the new technology surfaced at CNET and Sports Illustrated, where editors let AI run amok with disastrous results. Elsewhere in news media, AI is already writing headlines, managing paywalls to increase subscriptions, performing transcriptions, turning stories in audio feeds, discovering emerging stories, fact checking, copy editing and more.
Felix M. Simon, a doctoral candidate at Oxford, recently published a white paper about AI’s journalistic future that eclipses many early studies. Swinging a bat from a crouch that is neither doomer nor Utopian, Simon heralds both the downsides and promise of AI’s introduction into the newsroom and the publisher’s suite.
Unlike earlier technological revolutions, AI is poised to change the business at every level. It will become — if it already isn’t — the beginning of most story assignments and will become, for some, the new assignment editor. Used effectively, it promises to make news more accurate and timely. Used frivolously, it will spawn an ocean of spam. Wherever the production and distribution of news can be automated or made “smarter,” AI will surely step up. But the future has not yet been written, Simon counsels. AI in the newsroom will be only as bad or good as its developers and users make it.
We proposed EMO, an expressive audio-driven portrait-video generation framework. Input a single reference image and the vocal audio, e.g. talking and singing, our method can generate vocal avatar videos with expressive facial expressions, and various head poses, meanwhile, we can generate videos with any duration depending on the length of input video.
New experimental work from Adobe Research is set to change how people create and edit custom audio and music. An early-stage generative AI music generation and editing tool, Project Music GenAI Control allows creators to generate music from text prompts, and then have fine-grained control to edit that audio for their precise needs.
“With Project Music GenAI Control, generative AI becomes your co-creator. It helps people craft music for their projects, whether they’re broadcasters, or podcasters, or anyone else who needs audio that’s just the right mood, tone, and length,” says Nicholas Bryan, Senior Research Scientist at Adobe Research and one of the creators of the technologies.
There’s a lot going on in the world of generative AI, but maybe the biggest is the increasing number of copyright lawsuits being filed against AI companies like OpenAI and Stability AI. So for this episode, we brought on Verge features editor Sarah Jeong, who’s a former lawyer just like me, and we’re going to talk about those cases and the main defense the AI companies are relying on in those copyright cases: an idea called fair use.
The FCC’s war on robocalls has gained a new weapon in its arsenal with the declaration of AI-generated voices as “artificial” and therefore definitely against the law when used in automated calling scams. It may not stop the flood of fake Joe Bidens that will almost certainly trouble our phones this election season, but it won’t hurt, either.
The new rule, contemplated for months and telegraphed last week, isn’t actually a new rule — the FCC can’t just invent them with no due process. Robocalls are just a new term for something largely already prohibited under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act: artificial and pre-recorded messages being sent out willy-nilly to every number in the phone book (something that still existed when they drafted the law).
EIEIO…Chips Ahoy!— from dashmedia.co by Michael Moe, Brent Peus, and Owen Ritz
Here Come the AI Worms — from wired.com by Matt Burgess Security researchers created an AI worm in a test environment that can automatically spread between generative AI agents—potentially stealing data and sending spam emails along the way.
Now, in a demonstration of the risks of connected, autonomous AI ecosystems, a group of researchers have created one of what they claim are the first generative AI worms—which can spread from one system to another, potentially stealing data or deploying malware in the process. “It basically means that now you have the ability to conduct or to perform a new kind of cyberattack that hasn’t been seen before,” says Ben Nassi, a Cornell Tech researcher behind the research.
SAN JOSE, Calif. – [On 2/20/23], Adobe (Nasdaq:ADBE) introduced AI Assistant in beta, a new generative AI-powered conversational engine in Reader and Acrobat.
…
Simply open Reader or Acrobat and start working with the new capabilities, including:
AI Assistant: AI Assistant recommends questions based on a PDF’s content and answers questions about what’s in the document – all through an intuitive conversational interface.
Generative summary: Get a quick understanding of the content inside long documents with short overviews in easy-to-read formats.
Intelligent citations: Adobe’s custom attribution engine and proprietary AI generate citations so customers can easily verify the source of AI Assistant’s answers.
Easy navigation:
Formatted output:
Respect for customer data:
Beyond PDF: Customers can use AI Assistant with all kinds of document formats (Word, PowerPoint, meeting transcripts, etc.)
Essential skills to thrive with Sora AI
The realm of video editing isn’t about cutting and splicing.
A Video Editor should learn a diverse set of skills to earn money, such as:
Prompt Writing
Software Mastery
Problem-solving skills
Collaboration and communication skills
Creative storytelling and visual aesthetics
Invest in those skills that give you a competitive edge.
The text file that runs the internet — from theverge.com by David Pierce For decades, robots.txt governed the behavior of web crawlers. But as unscrupulous AI companies seek out more and more data, the basic social contract of the web is falling apart.
The scammers used digitally recreated versions of an international company’s Chief Financial Officer and other employees to order $25 million in money transfers during a video conference call containing just one real person.
The victim, an employee at the Hong Kong branch of an unnamed multinational firm, was duped into taking part in a video conference call in which they were the only real person – the rest of the group were fake representations of real people, writes SCMP.
As we’ve seen in previous incidents where deepfakes were used to recreate someone without their permission, the scammers utilized publicly available video and audio footage to create these digital versions.
Since we launched Bard last year, people all over the world have used it to collaborate with AI in a completely new way — to prepare for job interviews, debug code, brainstorm new business ideas or, as we announced last week, create captivating images.
Our mission with Bard has always been to give you direct access to our AI models, and Gemini represents our most capable family of models. To reflect this, Bard will now simply be known as Gemini.
A new way to discover places with generative AI in Maps— from blog.google by Miriam Daniel; via AI Valley Here’s a look at how we’re bringing generative AI to Maps — rolling out this week to select Local Guides in the U.S.
Today, we’re introducing a new way to discover places with generative AI to help you do just that — no matter how specific, niche or broad your needs might be. Simply say what you’re looking for and our large-language models (LLMs) will analyze Maps’ detailed information about more than 250 million places and trusted insights from our community of over 300 million contributors to quickly make suggestions for where to go.
Starting in the U.S., this early access experiment launches this week to select Local Guides, who are some of the most active and passionate members of the Maps community. Their insights and valuable feedback will help us shape this feature so we can bring it to everyone over time.
Google Prepares for a Future Where Search Isn’t King — from wired.com by Lauren Goode CEO Sundar Pichai tells WIRED that Google’s new, more powerful Gemini chatbot is an experiment in offering users a way to get things done without a search engine. It’s also a direct shot at ChatGPT.
